Jerry West: The Vernacular Sublime
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 5, 4-6 pm
Artist in Conversation with Art Critic and Historian MaLin Wilson- Powell: Saturday, August 19, 4-5 pm
Jerry West, Flight Over Roswell, oil on canvas.
78 x 48 in.
Jerry West: The Vernacular Sublime highlights West's recent paintings, a selection of iconic paintings spanning over 50 years, as well as woodcut and copper plate etching prints.
“Together Jerry West’s paintings constitute a bestiary, a regional atlas, a natural history, an autobiography, a dream journal, and maybe an alchemical treatise, all written in images that we can read but only partially, and none reads alike,” Rebecca Solnit writes in an essay included in the 2015 monograph Jerry West: The Alchemy of Memory (Museum of New Mexico Press).
West's visual narratives personify the changes that occurred in New Mexico between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. As he just turned 90, West continues to produce a wide-ranging oeuvre combining his love of Santa Fe and the surrounding mountains, the prairie worlds, and all the events and people that passed through his life and imprinted his dreams and psyche.